MAJESTIC SEA CREATURE

Duolingo says “I miss you” in my notifications. I miss you too Duo, really I do.

My guitar does not say “I miss you” because it doesn’t have to, it sees plenty of me. At my best, at my worst, and at all my mediocre moments in between.

Duolingo wants something specific from me: To learn Spanish.

My guitar just wants me to lose myself in something beautiful, even if the shape of sound changes every time I play.

¿Por qué estas dos cosas pueden sentirse tan similares y tan diferentes al mismo tiempo, cuando la razón por la que comencé con ambas fue la misma?

Quizás la razón no cambió, pero mi conexión con ella sí.

If you were to slice me open, like a peach, or an avocado, you’d find a pit.

And that pit is made up of countless fibers, bound up into a loop, wrapped around themselves over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and… well… you get the idea.

Sometimes when I type, the words are just a byproduct. The sound that satisfies is the tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Try it yourself and you’ll see… tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Morse code plucked out on a heart string, finger pickin’, finger lickin’, wet with peach juice and avocado, mashed. (But not together, because well, gross!)

I hide behind the surreal, because in that world of melting clocks and ten hour long songs, nothing needs to make sense and so my nonsensical obsessions and predilections fit right in. A fly, staring through your very soul, then crawling deep into some long-forgotten keyhole.

You should have known from the start that I was a fire sign. Even worse, an archer with flaming arrows, meant to pierce and immolate hearts from a distance. Legs of a horse, unburdened by a cart, fleeing free into the forest at the first sign of trouble.

You should have known, and maybe you did know. But I’ll never know, because all we’ve got left is fever dream memories and all these eccentricities that echo across seas and rustle the leaves in the trees and sometimes even sting like bees, and… bite like fleas. Feel that itch? I heard it last seven years, maybe more.

Felt cute, but might delete this later. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Or just let yet another thinly veiled attempt at hello again pass.

Summer solstice today. Or was it yesterday? Funny how time slips away.

Anyway…

A half-decade of prismatic glass-shard shattered and scattered wisdom has taught me this: You can bundle up all of those moments of warmth and light and squeeze them ever so tight until they break down into a beam (hot and white)–but they’re so much prettier splashed across the continuum, spilling out in every which way in every shade of gray, in every color, and in everything in between.

Refracted back into the past, old light still burns bright even if the stars themselves are long gone. Even if the stars themselves are long gone.

You have to lay truth down on a slant, because looking at it straight burns retinas.

Emotions eclipse reason.

Yet we still roll on readily into yet another season.

I am very busy with work stuff, household chores, and estate administration stuff and will continue to be for the next couple weeks. Trying to prepare for a much needed summer break, falling behind on many things, stressed and overwhelmed.

The other day, my daughter decided to look up how to draw various Pokemon. She was super excited about her ability to draw Diglet, Dugtrio, and Jigglypuff. Then she decided she wanted to take requests, so I asked her for a Bulbasaur.

This immediately stressed her out. She tried to look up step-by-step how to draw instructions, and found some, but wasn’t happy with how things were turning out. She would get stuck after the first couple steps. (In part, because they didn’t really “look like a bulbasaur” until much farther on in the steps, when you erased and moved a bunch of lines)

She was whining about this a bit, while I was trying to work. I kept trying to give her quick bits of advice, and then putting headphones back on as soon as I felt she was unblocked. But sure enough, a couple minutes later, she would come back even more frustrated, which eventually got me frustrated.

She started crying, and so I asked her to take a few minutes to go to her room and calm down. Tried and true parenting trick, this also creates an opportunity for the parent to calm down, even if you never remember it until you actually do it.

What I realized is that I was trying to avoid the “interruption”, trying to get back to work, and that was a big part of what was guiding my behavior. But my daughter was both trying to build on her earlier success, and also make something for me, and her frustration stemmed from feeling like she wanted to do a good job and didn’t have the tools to do it herself.

I had the option of continuing to let her “tough it out” on her own, to try to teach her some sort of lesson about how to better control her emotions. But what I realized is, that wouldn’t be fun for me, or for her, and it might discourage her from spending time on creative things.

So instead, after a few minutes break for both of us, I had her sit down with me. I stopped what I was doing for I don’t know… 15 minutes… and I went line by line with her through the drawing. I’m not great at this stuff, not even close to good, but I do know some simple things, like how we need to “squish” certain things to make them look more natural, and stretch other things. How we need to erase and reshape lines when they seem out of place with the rest of the drawing, etc.

I walked her through all of that, explained what was going wrong at each step and why. Explained to her it’s normal to need to erase some things and try again, and that if she hasn’t drawn something many times before, all the small adjustments are just where the learning is happening.

Eventually, we got our end result. It was more than bulbasaur-ish enough for my daughter to proudly share with her brother and for him to say, “Wow, that’s a nice bulbasaur!”, which is really all that mattered.

This morning, my daughter showed me another little sketch she was working on. Another bulbasaur! And that one she was making all on her own…

The moral of the story? Sometimes drawing a bulbasaur with your kid is indeed an “emergency” and work can wait. It’s not that one moment that matters, but the message it sends when you give your kids the attention they need to grow, when they need it.

This week comes the heat. Today, we’ll press up against 90 degrees.

Last night, my arms and legs were covered in sand and sweat and so many gnats. I thought a fire would have scared them away, but instead it just lit me up like a landing strip, saying “Free meal here.”

A year ago, today, I said I felt like I was suspended mid-air in a motorcycle jump away from the stable and stagnant and into a weird and wild unknown.

Well, I survived the leap. I did not fall down into the ravine, I did not crash and burn.

But a whole year later, I’m feeling like I’m racing through inter-dimensional portals. One moment, a lush rainforest, filled with greenery and wild and all sorts of birds flying in every direction, air thick and heavy, dew dripping from every smooth surface.

Then flash, I’m on a salt flat, nothing around for thousands of miles.

Flash again, I’m in some suburban hellscape filled with nothing but cul-de-sacks and minivans and all you can eat “pizza” buffets for $3.99.

Flash again and I’m 2000 feet beneath a glacier, ice pick in hand, carving out a narrow tube just wide enough to wiggle through, freezing cold but somehow not losing any heat, just chipping, one small shattered glass fractal at a time.

And then I’m on some wild contraption, some vaguely apocalyptic vehicle cruising through mud, oh so much mud. Just free-flowing and ever-present tectonic milkshakes, staining and swallowing everything.

Then I’m on a ladder, five miles high, scraping sky, while some pelicans pass by and squawk “It’s time, Let go.”

And I look down and there is a net, beneath another net, beneath another net, beneath another net, and I’m tempted. Even if one doesn’t hold, the next one will get me. And if not that one, then the next one, and if not that one, the next one.

Nobody deserves this many safety nets. And yet, there are my hands, gripped on cool steel, white knuckling, trying desperately to reach for yet another rung. Nothings there, but do I keep climbing? Try to Wile E. Coyote my way up?

Of course not. But… muscle memory.

The heart is a muscle, too.

How could I forget?

Every day I ask myself that question.

To properly form new memories, there are some things you need to let fade away. Or at least, forget to remember for a while.

Otherwise everything gets tangled in vines.Or salted in brine. Or trapped under ice. Or stuck in the mud.

Like a river, all of this runs through me.

I try to build myself a raft, while wading waste deep. It isn’t easy. It isn’t super effective. But what alternatives are there?

Step out and find shore? What if there isn’t any? What if it’s just cliff upon cliff upon cliff reaching all the way to the heavens? What then?

So instead, I just watch out for falling trees, snap off some branches where I can, and whittle away while the waters wash over me.

Rivers upon rivers upon oceans of nonsense. Images absent of connection. Ten thousand hot air balloons inside of a bubble of sulferous gas, sixteen thousand leagues under the sea.

I need a plumber to come drain my subconscious. Snake out the soap scum and the clumps of hair and the caked together toothpaste, and the long forgotten comb that just went “plop” down the pipe.

Let all of this flicker right by me as I fall. Down through a net, then another, then another, until I’m moving so slowly that even though the last one still does not hold, I land with a gentle thud and nothing more than some dusty scrapes, no broken bones.

This is home. This is what I know.

For me, this is what it looks like to let go.

• Went on my first trip out of state since Feb 2020, and the first trip with friends in an even longer time. Vermont/New Hampshire were great!
• Poured my dad’s ashes into a brook near his cabin in Vermont. He died almost a year ago, but I was avoiding travel because of the pandemic, and also just… felt blocked from paying last respects.
• Started working on transition plans with the clients I will be pausing work for during the summer, as I take a couple months to recharge and also work on new things that will help shift my business towards things that are more sustainable for me over the long haul. This is not the easiest road to navigate, but just grinding through it and hoping it will pay off in the long run.
• Ate lots and lots and lots of fiddleheads.
• Visited a horse cemetery, after following a sign directly in front of an ice cream parlor that said “horse cemetery” with a big arrow on it. This is a thing I did not realize existed. There were… three dead horses from over 100 years ago, preserved in perpetuity.
• Laughed more in the last 72 hours than I probably have in the past year combined. But also got incredibly exhausted, and definitely need to do what I can to make this coming week a bit more low key.

• Finished preparing my 2020 taxes, finally.
• Dealt with various administrative chores for my dad’s estate.
  (probate in three states is uh… not fun)
• Held my dog in her last moments before she died.
  (Vet thinks it was a stroke)
• Bought a green laser and got into various hijinx with it.
  (It reaches all the way across the New Haven harbor!!!)
• Celebrated the kids’ mom buying a very nice condo in Branford.
• Made this list, in lieu of a proper post, but… in the hopes of getting back here to write more often soon enough.